I Started in Sales. Now I Help Teams Rethink How They Work.

My journey into automation, and why I stopped just solving the request

I didn't start in IT. I joined Chillibreeze in sales, did my training and probation there, and then moved into operations. In operations, I learned how Business Central works: how data moves, and how changing one page can affect another. I didn't know it then, but that would shape everything I do now.

Finding where I fit

Around September or October last year, I moved into IT and joined the AI team. I tried different ways to contribute, and then I found my place in Power Automate, building automations and workflows. I started with small projects and learned mostly on the job. Whenever I got stuck, my teammates helped me figure out the next step.

As I got more confident, I told Salesian, my manager at the time, that I wanted to do more than build solutions. I wanted to become a systems-and-process consultant, someone who helps other teams see what can be automated, improve their processes, and build solutions themselves with the right guidance.

What automation actually is

Automation is just connecting tools so they can talk to each other. Something happens in Teams, and an item gets created in a SharePoint list. An email arrives, and a reply goes out automatically. A workflow is a set of these flows working together toward one goal.

Don't just fix what's in front of you

When I started, I would complete exactly what was requested. Over time I realised that requests are almost always connected to other processes. If you only fix the problem you can see, it might be a temporary fix, and the root cause is still there. So now I look at where a process starts, where the data comes from, how it moves, and where it ends. Today I'm usually the first person to look at automation requests and I maintain flows that were built before I joined. But it's a team effort, not something I do alone.

From 15 minutes to 10 seconds

The IT Admin team saw a lot of their work as physical: laptops, chargers, connectivity. But when I looked at what happens when an employee leaves, I saw admin steps that could be automated. One person on the team didn't think it could be done. We tested it together, and that changed.

Now about 80% of the exit process is automated: blocking sign-in, setting an out-of-office message, removing licences, and updating records. What used to take 10 to 15 minutes by hand now takes about 10 seconds. The only manual part left is collecting physical assets.

Letting Operations work inside Teams

Operations Team gets around 20 to 30 requests a day. They had moved their cases from Dynamics to Planner, but people still had to keep switching tools to assign and close requests. So we redesigned it around where they already work:

A Service Desk request creates a Teams chat and posts a notification in the channel.
A team member reacts with a thumbs-up, and the Planner case is assigned to them and moved into their bucket.
When the work is done, they type “DONE” in the chat, and the Planner task closes.
The requester automatically gets a CSAT card to share feedback.

The Operations team is using it, and it saves a lot of repeated clicks every day.

What I'd tell anyone starting out

You don't need to start in IT to grow into this. You can learn on the job.
Look at the whole process, not just the request.

Build automations where people already work.